In November 1961 a group of world renowned scientists convened for
discussions on the subject of intelligent extraterrestrial life.
Following the conference, a coded message was devised and sent to
all of the participating scientists to gauge the difficulty in
deciphering artificial extraterrestrial signals Only one of the
recipients (Carl Sagan could not!) was able to decode the message.
Given that all involved were of the same species, spoke the same
language and were familiar, to the greatest extent, with the
principles used for the coded message, some idea emerges of the
problems to be faced in interstellar communication. The coded
message below, representing a single continuous string of 1s and
0s, uses the same technique employed in the 1961 message. Being
that geocachers are not of the same species and do not speak the
same language as the scientists, this might be a better gauge of
non human species ability to decipher terrestrial signals. On the
other hand, the scientists received a version with a single
continuous string of 1s and 0s about four times longer than
composed for geocachers, a lower life form.
1110111010001110001011101110000101010101000
1000101010101000100111011100110001010101110
0100000100010001000101010101001110111000101
1101010111011100000000000000000000000000000
00111011101000111000111011101111010100010101
0100000101000100111001001110111000010001001
1100100010001010100010000010101111011100010
11101011101110111
Below is a false color image of a signal received by a large
ground based radio antenna in 2004. It is the first instance of a
signal that could not immediately be discounted as due to
terrestrial interference or stellar sources. A portion of the
signal may be heard using
Windows Media Player.
You can check your answers for this puzzle on
Geochecker.com.